Recoll user manualInstallation and configuration

Supporting packages

Note

The Windows installation of Recoll is self-contained, and
only needs Python 2.7 to be externally installed. Windows users can
skip this section.

Recoll uses external applications to index some file
types. You need to install them for the file types that you wish to
have indexed (these are run-time optional dependencies. None is
needed for building or running Recoll except for indexing their
specific file type).

After an indexing pass, the commands that were found
missing can be displayed from the recollFile menu. The list is stored in the
missing text file inside the configuration
directory.

A list of common file types which need external
commands follows. Many of the handlers need the
iconv command, which is not always listed as a
dependancy.

Please note that, due to the relatively dynamic nature of this
information, the most up to date version is now kept on http://www.recoll.org/features.html
along with links to the home pages or best source/patches pages,
and misc tips. The list below is not updated often and may be quite
stale.

For many Linux distributions, most of the commands listed can
be installed from the package repositories. However, the packages
are sometimes outdated, or not the best version for Recoll, so you
should take a look at http://www.recoll.org/features.html if a file
type is important to you.

As of Recoll release 1.14, a number of XML-based formats that
were handled by ad hoc handler code now use the
xsltproc command, which usually comes with
libxslt. These are: abiword, fb2
(ebooks), kword, openoffice, svg.

Now for the list:

Openoffice files need unzip and
xsltproc.

PDF files need pdftotext
which is part of Poppler (usually
comes with the poppler-utils
package). Avoid the original one from
Xpdf.

Postscript files need pstotext.
The original version has an issue with shell
character in file names, which is corrected in recent
packages. See http://www.recoll.org/features.html for more detail.

MS Word needs
antiword. It is also useful to have
wvWare installed as it may be
be used as a fallback for some files which
antiword does not handle.

Audio files: Recoll releases 1.14 and later use
a single Python handler based
on mutagen for all audio file
types.

Pictures: Recoll uses the
ExiftoolPerl package to extract tag
information. Most image file formats are supported. Note that
there may not be much interest in indexing the technical tags
(image size, aperture, etc.). This is only of interest if you
store personal tags or textual descriptions inside the image
files.